Blood of Victory (26 page)

“Well, thank you, my friend.”

“Je vous en prie, monsieur.”
My pleasure.

He was at Anya Zak’s apartment an hour later. He’d gone first to Ulzhen, but the concierge said they were out for the evening. “So,” she said, when she opened the door, “now you see the truth.”
The real Anya.
Who wore two heavy nightgowns, a pair of French army socks, and wool gloves, one green, the other gray.

Serebin sat on the couch, the empty box on his lap. Anya Zak stood over a hot plate and began to boil water for tea.

“I should tell you,” he said, “that I am a fugitive.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“Really. What have you done?”

“Nothing much.”

“Well, whatever it is, I hope it’s very bad. Reprehensible.”

“Can I stay here, Anya?”

She nodded yes, and measured out tea from a canister as she waited for the water to boil. “There are people, you know, who say you do things.”

“People are wrong.”

“Are they? Well, even so, I’m proud of you.”

He slept on the couch, under his overcoat—she insisted he take the blanket but he wouldn’t. Neither of them really slept. They talked in the darkness, once the lights were out, about countries and cities, about what had happened to people they knew. Then he thought she’d fallen asleep. But he could see her shape beneath the covers, restless, moving around, turning over. At one point, when it was very late, she whispered, “Are you asleep?” He almost answered, then didn’t, and breathed as though he were.

THE EMPRESS OF SZEGED

26 MARCH. BELGRADE.

Or so the British cartographers called it. To the local residents it was Beograd, the White City, the capital of Serbia, as it had always been, and not of a place called Yugoslavia, a country which, in 1918, some diplomats made up for them to live in. Still, when that was done, the Serbs were in no shape to object to anything. They’d lost a million and a half people, siding with Britain and France in the Great War, and the Austro-Hungarian army had looted the city. Real, old-fashioned, neoclassical looting—none of this prissy filching of the national art and gold. They took
everything.
Everything that wasn’t hidden and much that was. Local residents were seen in the street wearing curtains, and carpets. And, ten years later, some of them, going up to see friends in Budapest, were served dinner on their own plates.

Serebin’s train arrived at dawn, a flock of crows rising to a pink sky from the station roof. His departure from Paris had turned into something quite like an escape—effected with the aid of Kacherin, of all people, the world’s worst poet. Because Kacherin, who wrote saccharine verse about his mother, was also Kacherin the émigré taxi driver, and for Serebin, once he declared himself a fugitive, the Gare de Lyon was out of the question
—everybody
was arrested there. So he gave Anya Zak money to buy him a valise and some clothes to put in it, and Kacherin drove him all the way to Bourges—he’d only asked for Etampes—the demarcation line for the Unoccupied Zone. An unexpectedly useful accomplice, Kacherin, who eased them through checkpoint after checkpoint with a hesitant smile and a nervous laugh. “Missed his train,” Kacherin told the Germans, making a bottle of his fist, thumb out, pinkie raised, and tilting it up to his mouth, while Serebin accommodated the fiction by holding his head in his hands. Oh those Russians.

Thus Kacherin did, in the end, turn out to have talent, it just wasn’t what he wanted it to be. They talked all the way to Bourges—that was at least, Serebin speculated, part of the reason Kacherin agreed to take him. Talked and talked. About poetry, about history, stars, bugs, tarot, Roosevelt. The man had a passion for the minutiae of the world—should he perhaps consider writing about
that
? No, shut up and be nice, Serebin told himself, an admonition delivered in the voice of his own mother.

Not so good in Belgrade.

The bar at the Srbski Kralj—King of Serbia,
the
hotel in town—was throbbing, mobbed with every predator in the Balkans, anonymous men with their blondes mixed in among knots of foreign correspondents. Serebin counted four different languages, all in undertones of various volumes, on his way across the room.

“Ah, Serebin,
salut.
”

Here you are, at last.
Marrano was glad, relieved, to see him. Introduced him to the two pale Serbs, in air force uniform, who shared his table, “Captain Draza and Captain Jovan,” smoking feverishly and radiating conspiracy from every pore. Ranks and first names? This was either sinister or endearing, Serebin couldn’t decide which.
Maybe both.
Russians and Serbs, Slavs who spoke Slavic languages, could understand each other, and Captain Draza asked him where he’d come from.

“Paris.”

“How can you live there?” They practically spit—living under German occupation was clearly outside their definition of manhood.

“Maybe I can’t.”

“That cocksucker thinks he’s coming down here,” Jovan said.

“He won’t like it,” Draza said.

It was evening by the time Marrano and Serebin walked toward the docks, through mud streets lined by little shacks that served as cafés. Inside, fires glowed in open brick ovens, the patrons laughed, shouted, cursed, and somebody played a mandolin or a balalaika. Where the street curved downhill, Marrano stumbled over a pig on a rope, which gave a single, irritated snort, then went back to rooting in the dirt. Somewhere above them, a woman was singing. Serebin stopped to listen. “Only the moon shines on the heights/And lights up the graves of the soldiers.”

Marrano asked him what it was.

“A Russian army song, ‘The Hills of Manchuria,’ from the 1905 war with Japan.”

“A lot of émigrés, here?”

“Thirty-five thousand. From Denikin’s army, and Wrangel’s. Cossacks and doctors and professors, you name it. There was a big IRU chapter in Belgrade but they broke away from the Paris organization. Our politics—you know how that goes.”

Now they could see the docks, where the river Sava met the Danube—lanterns fore and aft on barges and tugs, and their shimmering reflections in the water. A few flood lamps, where work went on at night, a shower of blue sparks from a welder’s torch, red lights on buoys that marked a channel out in the river.

“Peaceful, isn’t it,” Marrano said. “Too bad it won’t last.”

Serebin knew that was true.
Another city on fire.

“The Balkans are a problem now, for Herr Hitler. Italian army pushed all the way up into Albania and the Greeks not about to quit fighting. So, he’s got to send a serious force, thirty divisions, say, to calm things down, and they’ve got to go through Yugoslavia to get where they’re going. Which means the Belgrade government had better sign up with the Axis, or else. Right now, Hitler’s at the edge of his patience; ultimatums, bribed ministers, a fifth column—Croatia, and what comes next is invasion. The Yugoslavs know it, and they’ll give in, the government will, but the word at the Srbski Kralj is that the military, particularly the air force, won’t stand for it.”

As they neared the harbor they had to wait while a man came and got his dog, some kind of immense Balkan mastiff, so black he was almost invisible, who stood his ground and growled to let them know they were not allowed to go down his street. “A thousand pardons,” the man said, from the darkness.

“The two captains,” Serebin said. “They’re working for us?”

“For London, technically,” Marrano said. “But the simple answer is yes. There is now a second operation, an alternative plan in case the barges don’t work. In a way, it’s a better idea, but it will require digging and drilling, will require overt cooperation from the Yugoslavs, and it took Hitler to press Belgrade very hard before we got the answer we wanted.”

“What will they do?”

“Take the cliff on the Yugoslav side of the river and drop it in the Danube.”

“By digging and drilling?”

“That’s just to set explosive charges. Once we leave the freight business, we go into mining.”

They circled the harbor on an old wooden catwalk until Marrano found the dock he was looking for. At the far end, past river families cooking over charcoal braziers, past bargeloads of lumber and tar barrels and heavy rope, there was a small machine shop in a rusted tin shed. Inside, a workman at a bench was taking a carburetor apart, dipping each piece in a pan of gasoline to clean it. The shop smelled good to Serebin, oil and burnt iron, scents of the Odessa waterfront.

“Tell him we’re Captain Draza’s friends,” Marrano said.

Serebin translated, and the workman said, “Then you’re welcome here.”

“The magic formula,” Serebin said.

“In some places, yes. Others, I wouldn’t try it.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, Serbian nationalists. Ultranationalists? Fascists? Anyhow they’re on our side, for the moment, so the name doesn’t matter.”

Beyond politics, Serebin knew exactly who they were. They reminded him of a few of the men who’d served with him in the civil war, and in the Ukraine, during the war with Poland. When you needed somebody to go crawling around in the enemy camp, when you needed somebody to deal with the sniper in the bell tower, it was Draza and Jovan who went. And, not always but surprisingly often, did the job and came back alive. You saw it in their eyes, in the way they carried themselves. They were good at fighting, it was just that simple, and Serebin, the officer Serebin, had quickly learned to tell them apart from the others.

Marrano strolled out to the end of the wharf. “Come and have a look.”

Serebin joined him. Roped to the dock were four barges, riding low in the filthy water, with tarpaulins tied down over high, bulky shapes. Serebin stepped over onto the first in line, put a hand on the canvas, and felt a round iron wall. All that time in Bucharest, this was what they got for it.

“There should be three more,” Marrano said. “Two from Germany, one here in Belgrade, but it looks like the German shipment isn’t coming.”

“What happened?”

“According to Gulian, the honorable gentlemen at the Zollweig factory are having difficulties. They refer, in their wire, to ‘an anomaly in the application for export license.’”

“What does
that
mean?”

“I would say it means, in German commercial terminology, something akin to
fuck you.
”

“They were paid.”

“Oh yes.”

“So it’s robbery. When all the nice language is peeled away, they stole the money.” He paused, then said, “Or, if it isn’t that, it is,” he looked for the right word, “intervention.”

“That’s a possibility. Very,
very
unappetizing, if true. Polanyi and I spent time on that, in Istanbul.”

“And?”

“Who knows.”

“Well then, four barges will just have to be enough.”

Marrano looked at his watch. “Five, maybe. And, while we’re waiting, let me tell you how we’re going to do this.”

The workman finished his carburetor, drew a shutter down over the entry, snapped a padlock on it, and left for the evening. The weather was warm, it was almost a spring night in the harbor, so Marrano and Serebin sat on the wooden pier and leaned back against the metal shed. Marrano produced a page of typescript and gave Serebin a pad and pencil.

“Here in Belgrade, we’re at kilometer 1170 of the river, which means we’re a hundred and forty kilometers from the high ridge at 1030. The ridge runs for three kilometers, which should be enough—we don’t know how much time it will take to sink these things, but with the weight they’re carrying they’ll go down in a hurry.

“The tug will have to stop at the Roumanian border post—that’s at a village called Bazias, at kilometer 1072. If you leave here at one in the afternoon, figuring a speed of fifteen kilometers an hour, it gets you to Bazias by 7:30. Your papers are in order, and you should be through there in twenty minutes or so. Sometime after 9:45, you pass the pilot station at Moldova Veche, on the Roumanian shore. Supposedly, a pilot must be taken onboard for the passage through the Iron Gates. However, in real life, which is to say Roumanian life, all the big steamers do this, but only some, maybe half, of the tugboats. A pilot would complicate your life, but it isn’t the end of the world, though it might have to be for the pilot if he decides not to be reasonable.

“By this calculation, you come to kilometer 1030—there’s a big granite rock protruding from the water at 1029, it probably has some sort of folkloric nickname—sometime after ten at night. So, when you sight the rock, that’s it. The captain of the tugboat, discovering that one of his barges is sinking and taking the others down with it, now must cut the tow and, as soon as possible, alert the Danube authority.

“But by then, you’ll be long gone. About forty minutes beyond the Stenka ridge, kilometer 1018, the river Berzasca enters the Danube from the north, coming down from the Alibeg mountains, part of the Carpathian range. There’s a village where the rivers meet, and the tug will go a kilometer or so upstream, to a bridge over a logging road. On the bridge will be a Lancia, the Aprilia sedan, horribly dented and scratched, probably the color gray when first purchased or stolen, and it is not impossible that there was, at some point, a fire in the trunk. You may, if you’re like me, spend an idle hour wondering how such a thing could possibly have happened, but cars don’t live soft lives in this country and it remains a speedy and dependable machine. I’ll be driving, and we’ll take the Szechenyi road back to Belgrade. Then we stay here, see what develops on the river, and attend to our mining interests. Any questions?”

“The Szechenyi road?” Serebin knew it by reputation, a narrow track, hewn out of rock in the nineteenth century, at the direction of the Hungarian count who gave it his name.

“It works, I’ve tried it, just hope for dry weather. We use it also in the emergency plan, which has us bypassing Belgrade, crossing Yugoslavia by train—it is very difficult by car—or, in a real emergency, by plane, courtesy of our friends in the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, to a town called Zadar, between Split and Trieste on the Dalmatian coast. There we will be picked up by boat, probably the
Néréide
but with Polanyi you never know. The contact in Zadar is a florist, in a small street off the central square, called Amari. If you need to signal for help, no matter where you are, wire Helikon Trading with the message
Confirm receipt of your letter of 10 March.

“Eventually, you can go back to Paris, or, if they’ve found out who you are and they’re after you, Istanbul. I should add that when Polanyi was told of your meeting at the bar in Paris, it was his feeling that no matter what went on or didn’t, your margin of safety has been compromised and you ought to get out.”

“He’s right,” Serebin said.

“He often is. So then, Istanbul.”

Serebin began to describe his flight from Paris, but the ragged beat of a tugboat engine approached from the mouth of the harbor and he rose and followed Marrano out to the end of the pier. In the glow of the dock light he could read the boat’s name,
Empress of Szeged.
So, a Hungarian boat. Which, when he thought about it, was no surprise at all. As the tug, towing a heavily loaded barge, slid cleverly up to the dock, Emil Gulian, looking exceptionally out of place in business hat, scarf, and overcoat, appeared at the stern, waved, then tossed Serebin a rope. “Hello there,” he called out. “Good to see you again.”

Serebin secured the line to a heavy bollard, then boarded the tugboat and walked forward to the pilot cabin. The
Empress
was manned by its owners, a young couple, both wearing the river sailor’s uniform of dark blue shirt and trousers. Zolti, short for Zoltan, was Hungarian, lean and wiry, face weathered by life on the water. Erma, a Viennese, was a few inches taller, broad and fat, with an immense bosom, sleeves rolled back to reveal a pair of meaty arms, and a face that would stop a clock. A peasant face, broad and fleshy, with shrewd, beady eyes, a bulbous nose, and a wide slash of a mouth, anxious to laugh at a world that had laughed at her. All this crowned by ebony hair that had been chopped off with—Serebin thought about a hatchet, but, more likely, a scissors.